Dear friend!

Received the translation1. Thank you very much. Sent it on.

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Apparently, your non-response to my last few letters2 indicates - in connection with something else - some changed mood or decision or state of affairs with you. Your last letter3 contained the word repeated twice at the end - I understood, coped. Nothing. I don't know what to think, whether you are offended by something or were too distracted by the move or something else.... I'm afraid to ask you, because I think asking you questions is unpleasant for you, and therefore I'll agree that I accept your silence on this point in the sense that asking me questions is unpleasant for you, and that's it. I then apologize for them and will certainly not repeat them.

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And about the censorship to which you subjected my French article4, I am surprised, yes, yes. Since you did not send me the original, and I would hardly even undertake to translate it into French myself, I sent it, of course, according to yours, with the omission of the part about Engels.

"At the mere thought that I am defending E[ngels'] point of view on the war and on the position of the Germans of that time, your blood boils and you cannot translate it..."

Dda! I didn't expect it! After all, we, both Gr[igory] and I, have referred to this place - more than a place: the statement, exposition, declaration - of E[ngel]sa5 many times, directly and indirectly, in 1914 and 1915.

For it was written by E[ngels] first for the French socialists and printed in their "Almanach du P[artie] O[uvrier]"6. And so the French did not protest, feeling - if not clearly understanding - that the war of Boulanger + Alexander III against the then G[e]rm[an]ia would be anti-democratic only on their part, and on the part of the G[e]rm[an]ia (whose imperialism was then out of the question!!) would really only be a "defense", really a war for national existence.....

And what the Fr[an]c[u]zers themselves recognized in 1891 as true, you suddenly shit, and how! And the day before, in a meeting of the Swiss Left, they (semi-pacifists, you can't do anything about them) dismissed my reference to this statement by E[ngels] with an unbelievable, to them alone peculiar levity.

You did not say anything about my article in reply2* to Kievsky7 either.

I am more and more convinced by my work with the Left Swedes, as well as by my reflection on the absurdities to which Radek has agreed, that on the most important question of the motive for the evasion of the Fatherland only our position is correct. Have you seen No. 6 "Jug[end]-Int[ernationa]le" about which I wrote in Collected Works No. 2 (received ?) and "Arb[eiter]politik" No. 258?

I have a postcard from Kam[ene]va9. I will send it to you.

Olga writes that the affairs of the Left are improving, that an organization of the French + Italians (!!!) + Russian - Zim[merwald] Left has been founded and that Guilbeau will write to me about it (I will send it to you if you want). I try to follow "Avanti!"10 and I am convinced that Souvarine is right: Turati is quite a Kautskyite and puts the whole social[ialist] faction of the Italian Chamber on these rails. His last speech (17.I) is clever: a clever pacifist of bourgeois pacifism, not a socialist at all.

I shake his hand firmly, firmly.

Yours3*.

Published (without the paragraph after the first phrase) - Lenin V.I. Complete Collected Works, vol. 49, с. 374-376.

Fund 2, op. 1, d. 4401 - autograph.

1* The letter has a note I.F.Armand: "January 22, 1917", on the basis of which the letter is dated

2* Further crossed out: "To Yuri".

3* Further Lenin's signature is a stroke.

1V.I. Lenin thanks I.F. Armand for translating into French the resolution of the Swiss Left demanding a referendum on the question of convening an extraordinary congress of the Social Democratic Party of Switzerland, postponed indefinitely by a resolution of the Party Board. Lenin sent the resolution to Armand on January 6 (19), 1917 (see: Lenin V.I. Complete Works, vol. 49, p. 368).

2Letters of V.I. Lenin have not survived.

3I.F.Armand's letter to V.I.Lenin has not survived.

4It means "Open Letter to Boris Suvarin" (see: Lenin V.I. Complete Collected Works, vol. 30, pp. 261-272).

5It refers to the work of F. Engels "Socialism in Germany" (see: Marx K., Engels F. Oeuvre, 2nd ed., vol. 22, pp. 247-264).

6 "Almanach du Parti Ouvrier pour 1892" ("Almanach of the Labor Party for 1892") - French socialist weekly, published in Lille in 1892-1894 and 1896.

7See Doc. 100, note 5.

8The newspaper "Jugend-Internationale" ("Youth Internationale") No. 6 of December 1, 1916 (n. s.) published N. I. Bukharin's article "The Imperialist Robber State"; with abbreviations and under the title "The Imperialist State" it was also printed in the magazine "Arbeiterpolitik" No. 25 of December 9, 1916 (n. s.). V.I.Lenin in his note "The International of Youth" criticizes the article by N.I.Bukharin (see: Lenin V.I. Complete Collected Works, vol. 30, pp. 225-229). Lenin's note was published in "Sbornik Sotsial-Demokrat" No. 2, December 1916.

"Jugend-Internationale" ("Youth Internationale"), a newspaper, the organ of the International Union of Socialist Youth Organizations, affiliated to the Zimmerwald Left, was published in Zurich from September 1915 to May 1918.

"Arbeiterpolitik" - weekly journal, organ of the Bremen group of left-wing radicals, published in Bremen from 1916 to 1919.

9It is possible that this refers to a letter from L.B. Kamenev to V.I. Lenin of September 13 (26), 1916, about the addressee's article "The Collapse of the Second International" (see: Lenin V.I. Complete Works, vol. 26, pp. 209-265).

10 "Avanti!" - daily newspaper, the central organ of the Italian Socialist Party. Published in Rome since December 1896.